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When Hurricane Ike struck the Gulf Coast in the early hours of September 13, 2008, Texas’ Bolivar Peninsula was ground zero. Before the category 2 storm made landfall, large stretches of beachfront on this narrow, low-lying spit of land were chockablock with homes standing on stilts behind dunes up to 2 meters tall.

When tiny hairpin-shaped molecules act up, they don’t rebel loner-style like James Dean. Instead they take on the persona of Darth Vader, crushing proteins under their command and turning acquaintances to the dark side as well. In this case, though, the fight is for control not of the universe, but of the body. And a dark-side victory could end in cancer.

On an early summer morning in northern Minnesota, a crew of about a dozen waits by the top of mine shaft No. 8. Donning hard hats, the engineers and physicists pile into a creaky, double-decker elevator cage. It is pitch black for most of the three-minute descent. Ears pop, the cage floor vibrates and a giant motor dating from 1925 thunders overhead.

CAT PHOBIA TREATMENT — [A] patient was cured of cat phobia by forcing herself to handle velvet until she got used to it. The patient, a 37-year-old married woman ... had had a fear of cats as long as she could remember.... The therapist began ... [with] what she felt was the least objectionable idea associated with cats — their fur.... [First he used] velvet, which has some of the texture...

In 2008, science and technology writer Nicholas Carr asked in The Atlantic if Google is “making us stupid.” His latest book is an effort to answer that question and, more broadly, to explore how the tools of the Internet age are altering the way people find and use information.

Carr spends much of the book exploring how technology has shaped human habits of information...

Dire predictions about global warming make it hard to imagine how the human race will cope with the droughts, heat waves and advancing seas that climate change is expected to bring later this century. But economist Matthew Kahn has a message for prosperous urbanites in developed (and rapidly developing) nations who worry about the fate of their children and grandchildren in a greenhouse world...